#ryhsand

I'm sorry. I shouldn't have come out tonight. He had not replied.

She turned onto her side. She pulled the covers over her head and pressed her face into the pillow and thought about every single second of the events from a few hours ago.

The way his hands had discovered her back. The knot releasing. The sound she had made. God, the sound. She could still hear it, that soft helpless thing, and she wanted to reach back through time and press her hand over her own mouth, because that sound was the hinge. That sound was the moment the evening had pivoted from something they could explain into something they could not.

His hand on her neck. The slow deliberate migration of his fingers from her spine to the nape of her neck, and the difference between fixing something and wanting something, and she had leaned into it. She had leaned into it as if her body had been waiting years for exactly that pressure in exactly that place.

And then his forehead on her shoulder. And then his mouth.

She pressed her fingers to the spot on her shoulder where his lips had been. The skin was cool now, identical to every other inch of her, bearing no evidence of what had happened there. She hated that. She hated that skin could not hold the memory of being touched, that contact did not leave visible marks, that by morning every kiss became a thing you had to prove with nothing but your own unreliable recollection.

In every book she had ever read, in every film, every drama Nesta had made her watch on Sunday nights with wine and commentary, this was the scene that ended in a kiss. The hot tub, the confession, the I can't hold back, those words were a runway. They pointed in one direction. Every narrative she had ever consumed had taught her that what came next was the moment where the distance closed and the tension broke and two people finally stopped circling each other and collided.

She had been ready for it. She had been so ready for it that her body had already started composing the memory before it happened. The angle of his jaw. The way his wet hair would feel under her fingers. The taste of mineral water and midnight. She had offered herself. Not with words, not explicitly, but with the lean of her body and the tilt of her head and the way she had not moved when he had told her to go, because staying was its own language and she had been speaking it fluently.

And he had sent her away.

She curled onto her other side. The clock said 8:22.

Why?

The question was a wheel, turning and turning and arriving nowhere. She could still see his face. The tension in his jaw. The blown pupils. The way his hands had gripped the stone behind her as if he were holding himself to the earth. That was not the face of a man who did not want her. That was the face of a man who wanted her so badly the wanting had become a problem.

So why stop?

Was it her? Was it something about the way she looked or the way she had responded or the fact that she was, what? too quiet, too nervous, too obviously inexperienced, standing there in her bikini with her lip between her teeth while he sat in the water with old scars and a body that had clearly known touch before.

Does he see her as a woman?

The thought landed like a stone in still water, and the ripples spread, and she lay there feeling each one.

Maybe she was silly. Maybe she was a girl playing at something she did not understand, reading signals that were not there, mistaking kindness for desire because she was so desperate to be desired that any warmth felt like heat. Maybe he looked at her the way he looked at everyone, with that careful attentive patience that she had interpreted as special but was actually just the baseline of who he was, distributed equally, meaning nothing.

Maybe someone like him would never want someone like her.

She wanted to go home. She wanted this weekend to collapse into a single point and disappear and she wanted to be back with Mister Fern and her textbooks and the uncomplicated silence of a room that did not contain the memory of his hands on her back. She wanted to never see the onsen again. She wanted to never see the stars again. She wanted to unlearn the exact temperature of his mouth against her shoulder, which was slightly warmer than the steam and slightly cooler than the water, and she was never going to be able to unlearn it.

She turned onto her back. Sighed. The ceiling offered nothing.

If you don't go inside right now, I don't think I can hold back.

Hold back from what?

She knew. Of course she knew. The words were unambiguous. But knowing did not help, because if he wanted her, if he wanted her the way his voice and his hands and his eyes said he wanted her, then why was the wanting something he needed to hold back? Why was it a threshold he could not cross?

Maybe she should have kissed him. Maybe she should have been the one to close the distance. She had wanted to. She had wanted to so badly her teeth had ached with it.

She had thought he should make the first move. Because she had already leaned back into him, already tipped her head, already stayed when he told her to go. She had done everything short of saying it aloud, and the next step was his, and he had not taken it.

He had told her to leave.

Dammit!

8:38. Everyone would be downstairs soon. Or already was. She could hear, faintly, the distant percussion of a kitchen coming to life. A cabinet closing. Water running. Someone laughing, probably Cassian.

She had to go down there. She had to walk into that room and sit at that table and eat fruit and drink tea and be a person who had slept and was fine and was not, in any visible way, coming apart at the seams.

She sat up.

Her hair was a disaster. Her face felt swollen and tight in the way it did when she had cried, except she had not cried, which somehow made it worse. She had not even given herself the release of that.

She swung her legs over the edge of the bed. Stood. Pulled on a sweater over the t-shirt she had slept in, found the pair of shorts she had folded on the chair, moved toward the door.

——

They were all there.

Cassian was leaning back in his chair with a mug in one hand and a croissant in the other, saying something to Rhysand with his mouth full. Nesta sat beside him, close enough that their elbows touched. Feyre was pouring coffee, her hair still sleep-mussed, laughing at whatever Cassian had said. Rhysand was beside her, his hand resting on the back of her chair. Mor with them.

And Azriel.

He was at the end of the table. Coffee in front of him, untouched from the look of it, full to the brim, no steam. He had poured it and forgotten about it. He was in a dark sweater with the sleeves pushed to his elbows, and his hair was dry, which meant he had showered, which meant.

She stopped thinking about what it meant.

She looked at him for the fraction of a second it took to confirm he was there and then she looked away, and in that fraction she registered that he was not looking at her. He was looking at his coffee. At the table. At anything, apparently, that was not her.

"Good morning."

Mor. Bright as a sunrise, turning in her chair with a mug cradled in both hands and a smile that faltered the moment her eyes landed on Elain's face.

"Elain. What happened to you?" Mor's brows drew together. "Did you sleep at all?"

The heat hit Elain's cheeks so fast it felt chemical. Her hand flew to her face. To her cheek. To her under-eye. As if she could feel the damage through her fingertips. She said, too quickly, "Why? What do you mean?"

Mor's expression answered the question better than words could have.

And Elain realized, with the slow dawning horror, that she had not looked in the mirror. She had not checked. She had walked down here with whatever her face had decided to become after a night of no sleep and silent panic, and she was standing in front of all of them, in front of him, looking like evidence.

She crossed to the table. Pulled out the empty chair between Mor and Feyre. Sat down. Folded her hands in her lap.

Mor leaned closer, her voice dropping to a register that was meant to be discreet but was not, because Mor's version of discreet was simply louder whispering. "You look terrible. I mean that with love. Did something happen? Bad dream?"

Elain's fingers found the edge of a napkin. She folded it. Unfolded it. Folded it again.

He knows. He is sitting right there and he knows exactly why I did not sleep and he is not looking at me and he knows.

"It's probably the mattress," she said. Her voice came out steadier than she expected. "It wasn't very comfortable."

Rhysand's head turned. "What? Your bed isn't good?" His tone shifted into the one he had, part genuine concern and part man who had paid for something and expected it to meet a standard. "I'll talk to the manager. Which room are you in?"

"No. Rhys. Please. Stop." She held up a hand. "It's not the bed. It's just, I have a bad back. It was sore last night. That's probably all it was."

The words were out before she heard them. My back was sore last night. And she bit her lip, the involuntary stupid traitorous habit, because the back was the massage and the massage was his hands and his hands were the beginning of everything that had unwound between them in the water, and she was sitting here narrating the prologue to the worst night of her life in front of the person who had authored it.

She did not look at him. She did not need to. She could feel the quality of the silence from his end of the table.

Mor took a sip of her coffee. Set it down. "Okay, let me change the topic because I have news. I went for a walk this morning. Early, like obscenely early. There is a guy staying at the resort next door."

Elain poured herself a cup of tea. Her eyes moved over the table without her asking them to. Sugar, cream, syrup. No honey. She did not say anything. She wrapped her hands around the cup and decided not to ask for it.

"He saw me on the trail," Mor continued, "and we got talking, and he asked about our group, and Elain. He asked about you specifically. Whether you were single. He wanted your number."

The morning, which Elain had already ranked among the worst of her life, found a new depth.

"You didn't give it to him," she said. It was not a question. It was a prayer.

"No!" Mor pressed a hand to her chest, mildly offended. "I would never give out a friend's number without asking. But you should think about it. He's cute. Like, genuinely cute. Tall, dark hair, nice smile. And the most romantic love stories happen on holiday."

A small jar of honey appeared on the table.

She had not seen anyone get up. But the hand withdrawing from it was scarred, the sleeve dark and pushed to the elbow, and it returned to the end of the table without a word.

Elain stopped breathing.

It was the first thing he had done all morning. And she could not pick it up. Her face was burning. She left the honey where it was. She left the tea where it was. She tightened her hands around the cup.

"There is no resort," Azriel said.

Quiet. From the end of the table.

Mor turned. "What?"

"There is no resort around here. The next property is forty minutes by car."

"Did I say resort? I meant cabin. Down the trail."

"There is no cabin past the viewpoint, Mor."

Mor gave him a long, level look. Then she sighed and turned back to Elain. "Fine. That’s not the point."

Elain was not listening to her. She was looking at Azriel, who had said something at all. She glanced down at the honey jar.

She wondered why he had reacted to any of it.

"Yeah, give it a try" Nesta said, leaning forward with her elbows on the table and her chin on her hand. "Or, are you still mourning Graysen? Because it has been, what, two years?"

"Nesta."

"What. I'm just saying."

"Whoa, whoa, whoa,“ Cassian held up both hands. "Are we really discussing your sister's love life at the breakfast table?"

Elain's glare landed on Nesta. Nesta received it without flinching. She had been glared at by Elain Archeron enough times to have developed an immunity.

"Graysen was actually a nice guy," Feyre said, in the conciliatory tone she used when she was trying to build a bridge between sisters. "It's been two years, right?"

"He was not a nice guy," Nesta said flatly.

"His family was difficult. But he himself was decent. And he was good-looking, you have to admit."

"You only think he was nice because he had money." Nesta's said sharply. "He was terrible. He was spineless and boring and he treated Elain like shit. Don't you know what he said to her before they broke up?"

Elain's stomach dropped.

She knew what was coming. She could see it approaching like a train on a fixed track, and there was no switch, no diversion, no emergency brake. Nesta was going to say it, here, at this table, in front of everyone, in front of him.

"Nesta," she said. Quiet. The quiet that was louder than shouting. "Stop."

The table went silent.

Nesta held her gaze for a moment. One moment. And whatever she saw there made her close her mouth.

"Yeah," Cassian said, his voice careful and measured. "We should probably change the topic. What's the plan for today? Are we hiking, or?“

Voices filled the space. Mor said something about a trail. Rhysand mentioned snowshoeing. Feyre asked about lunch reservations. The conversation rebuilt itself around the wreckage of the moment like water closing over a stone, and Elain sat in the middle of it and heard all of it and listened to none of it.

She was so far away.

She was sitting in this chair with her cold tea and her swollen face and her folded hands, and she was also in a different room, in a different year, sitting on the edge of Graysen's bed in his family's house while he stood by the window and said it.

He had been looking at the garden when he said it. Not at her. You're beautiful, Elain. You know that. Everyone knows that. But.

But you're not satisfying. You're just basic. I don't feel what I'm supposed to feel.

He had said more. She could not remember all of it, or she could, but the individual words had dissolved into a single composite wound. Something about how he had expected more. Something about how she was pretty but pretty was not enough. Something that used the word boring and something else that used the word disappointing, and the two words had fused in her memory into a single verdict that she had been carrying ever since.

She hated sex because of him. She hated that he was her first.

Nesta had been furious when Elain had told her. Had said his expectations were manufactured by watching too much porn. Nesta had been right. Elain knew Nesta had been right the way she knew the earth was round, intellectually, theoretically.

But the other part, the part that lived in her body, in her skin, in the way she held herself. That part had believed him.

That part had spent two years believing that something was missing. That she was missing. That the something of her desire was faulty, that she was built for beauty but not for pleasure.

And then last night.

Last night, in the water, with the steam and the stars and his hands on her spine, she had felt, for the first time since Graysen, like something was unlocking. Like the door existed after all and had simply been sealed shut, and his fingers had found the seam. The sound she had made when the knot released. The way her body had leaned into his touch. She had felt desired. The real thing. The version that made a man's voice crack and his hands tremble and his breath come ragged against her skin.

She had felt, for one trembling impossible hour, like she was enough.

And then he had sent her away.

Sigh.

She wanted to go home.

——

Later Mor knocked on her door.

She was already changed. Coat over her arm. Knit hat in her hand. "Come on," she said. "Walk with me. I am not taking no for an answer."

Elain looked at her. She had been lying on top of the made bed, staring at the ceiling, and she did not want to move. But Mor had the specific patience of a person who would stand in a doorway for an hour, and Elain did not have the energy for the negotiation that refusing would require.

She pulled on her boots. Her coat. A scarf she wound twice around her neck. They slipped out the side door without anyone seeing them, into the white world of the path that wound away from the cabin along the edge of the trees.

The cold was the first honest thing she had felt all morning.

It came directly through her face. It found the damp at the corners of her eyes and made them water, and she let them, because crying from cold was at least a thing she could explain. The sun was higher now, white and low, throwing the long blue shadows of the pines sideways across the path. Their breath went out ahead of them and disappeared. Somewhere off in the trees a branch shed its load of snow with a soft collapsing sound, and then there was nothing again.

They walked. Mor did not say anything, and Elain understood that the not-saying was her way of giving Elain room.

They had been walking for ten minutes when the phone buzzed.

Mor pulled it out of her coat pocket without breaking stride. Glanced at the screen. And smiled.

She turned the screen toward Elain.

Azriel Don't do something stupid, Mor.

Elain stopped walking.

She read it once. Then again. The five words sat on the screen and she did not know which part to look at first. Don't. Stupid. The fact that there was a message at all, after a night of nothing, after a morning of nothing, after she had lain awake watching a phone that would not light up. He had words. He had had words this whole time. He had simply spent them on Mor instead of her.

Something cold moved through her that had nothing to do with the weather.

Mor tucked the phone away, looking entirely too pleased. "He texted me twice now, actually. He's been very chatty since we left."

Elain started walking again.

"What did the first one say?"

"Doesn't matter. This one's better." Mor's smirk could have belonged to a chess player who had just taken a queen and was deciding whether to mention it. "See? He is probably sitting in that cabin right now grinding his teeth down to nothing, picturing you off in the snow somewhere with the cute neighbour boy."

Elain did not answer.

They walked further until they found a bench and sat down.

"Do you want to tell me what's going on?" Mor said.

Her voice had changed. The smirk was gone from it. Whatever game she had been playing with the phone, she had set it down.

Elain kept her eyes on the frozen tree. "There's nothing going on."

"Mm." Mor let that sit. "Then I should probably confess something."

Elain looked at her.

"There's no guy."

The words took a second to land. "What?"

"The neighbour. The one who asked about you. He doesn't exist." Mor said it lightly, without apology. "I made him up this morning. There's no resort, no cabin down the east trail, no cute boy with dark hair and a nice smile. I invented all of it over breakfast."

Elain turned on the bench to face her fully.

"You made up a whole person."

"I made up a whole person." Mor turned too, hands still in her pockets, her breath clouding between them. "And before you decide to be mad at me, think about why I did it."

"Why did you do it."

"Because I wanted to see what he'd do." Mor tipped her head back toward the cabin, toward the man sitting in it. "And what you'd do. I floated one fake guy across that breakfast table and watched the temperature of the whole room change. Azriel corrected me twice. He fact-checked a building. What a loser. He could not let it go because the directions led to a man who wanted your number." She lifted the phone slightly from her pocket. "And then he texted me. Don't do something stupid. About a person who isn't real."

Elain's face had gone hot despite the cold.

"That was cruel," she said. But there was no force in it.

"It was a little cruel," Mor agreed. "I'll own that. But I have been watching the two of you orbit each other for weeks and getting absolutely nothing useful out of either of you, and sometimes the fastest way to find out what someone's holding is to give them a reason to drop it." She settled back against the bench, drawing one knee up. "And you. You sat there at breakfast looking like you wanted the floor to open up. You didn't take the honey he put in front of you. You wouldn't even drink your tea." She glanced sideways. "Which is its own answer, by the way. People don't fall apart over nothing."

Elain didn't say anything for a moment. The cold pressed up through the wooden slats of the bench. The creek ran on beneath its ice.

Mor pulled the phone out again. Held it loosely in her gloved hand without looking at it.

"And I'll tell you what's happening back at that cabin right now, because I'd put money on it." A slow grin started at the corner of her mouth. "He thinks you're on a date. Right now. This second. He thinks you walked out of there this morning and went to meet some man, and he is losing his mind over it. He's sitting on that sofa pretending to read the same page of a book he's not reading, checking the door every time the wind moves, building entire scenarios in his head about a person I invented out of nothing." She laughed, short and delighted. Elain stared at her.

And then Mor said more softly: "I am not going to push you. But maybe I can help you understand him a little. I have known him a long time."

Elain's hands were deep in her coat pockets. She could feel the cold pressing through the fabric.

"This stays between us," she said. "Right? You will not tell anyone. Not Azriel. Not Feyre."

Mor lifted a hand. "Sister codex. What you tell me goes into the vault and the vault does not open. You don't have to worry."

Elain nodded. Breathed.

"There is nothing going on between me and Azriel," Elain said. "We are friends. Maybe. I do not even know if he would call it that."

A pause.

"But I would be lying if I said I do not think about more than friendship."

Mor nodded. Slow. Unsurprised.

"That is not exactly a secret, Elain. I mean. It is an open secret. But go on."

"I thought maybe he felt the same way," Elain said. She was looking at her hands now. "Because he is. He is kind to me. Really kind. And we talk, and we text, and once."

She hesitated. The memory surfaced like something rising through water. The car. His hand warm and steady around hers.

"We held hands."

Mor's eyebrows rose. "You held hands?"

"In the car. While he was driving. But I asked him to. I told him to hold my hand. So it is not like it was something we did naturally. It was me. I initiated it."

"Continue," Mor said. The word was gentle but there was an urgency underneath.

Elain exhaled. "But it feels like he draws a line. Between us. Every time something shifts, he pulls back. And I do not know where the line is or why it is there, and I am just. Confused."

She turned to look at Mor.

"Yesterday evening," she said. "We were both in the hot tub."

Mor's eyes widened. "You. What? You were in the hot tub together?"

"Why are you so shocked?" Elain frowned. "He said you and him and Amren do it all the time."

Mor stared at her. Her mouth opened. Closed. Opened again.

"I'm sorry. He said what?"

"That he shares hot tubs with you and Amren. That it is normal."

The sound Mor made was somewhere between a laugh and a shriek. A bright disbelieving burst that startled a bird from a branch three trees away. She pressed her hand over her mouth. Her eyes were watering.

"I cannot. Elain. I do not even remember the last time I was in a hot tub with Azriel. Maybe once? Maybe once, at Rhys's cabin, years ago, and Cassian was there too and it was nothing." She wiped her eyes. She was laughing properly now. "Sweety. He lied to you. He just wanted you to get in. Oh my God, Azriel. You really think you're slick, don't you?"

The heat spread across Elain's cheeks so fast it felt like sunburn.

"So he just. Made that up," Elain said. Her voice was small.

"He absolutely made that up. He sat in that hot tub and watched you hesitate and thought, I know, I'll tell her it's a group activity, as if that man has ever voluntarily participated in a group activity in his life." Mor shook her head, still grinning. "God, he is so down bad. He cannot even lie properly. Then what happened?"

Elain's fingers tightened in her lap. "Then it got intimate."

Mor's laughter stopped.

"My neck was sore. And he offered to help. A massage. But then it changed. It became something else. And I thought."

She stopped. Swallowed.

"I thought he was going to kiss me."

Mor did not blink.

"But he didn't. He stopped. His voice was different. Rough. He told me I should go inside. He said if I didn't go, he could not hold back." She was speaking to her hands. "So I left. And he stayed. And later I sent him a text saying I was sorry, and he did not respond. And this morning he will not look at me. And I do not know what any of it means."

The silence that followed was the loudest thing Elain had ever heard.

Mor sat beside her on the bench with her lips pressed together and her eyes closed. She breathed in through her nose. Out through her mouth.

"I know exactly what he did after you left," she said.

Elain blinked. "What?"

Mor held up a hand. Pressed it over her own mouth. Made a sound behind her fingers, something strangled, half groan, half laugh.

"Elain. You have that man so wrapped around your finger it is actually embarrassing. He is so far gone for you. He is down bad in a way I have never seen him down bad for anyone, and I have known him since we were teenagers."

"That is."

"Why do you think he stopped?" Mor's voice was climbing now, not in anger but in sheer bewilderment. "Why do you think he told you to leave? Because he did not want you? Elain. He told you to leave because he wanted you so much he did not trust himself to stay in that water with you for one more second. He was protecting you. From himself. That is Azriel. He would rather tear himself apart than risk making you uncomfortable."

Elain's face was burning. Her ears. Her neck.

"You could have had hot tub sex," Mor said flatly. "And he ruined it. God's idiot."

"Mor. What the hell."

"Sorry. Sorry." Mor held up both hands. She was grinning again.

Her phone buzzed again. She pulled it out. Looked at the screen. This time the grin became something sharper. Something strategic.

"Look." She turned the phone toward Elain again.

Azriel Where are you. What are you doing.

"He messaged me again. He is losing his mind right now. He is probably pacing around that cabin thinking about the neighbour guy."

"Mor, don't."

But Mor was already typing.

Her thumbs moved across the screen, and before Elain could reach for the phone, Mor hit send and turned the screen toward her.

Mor Played matchmaker! Elain's spending some time with that cute guy from next door. Don't worry about us 😘

"Mor!" Elain's hand flew to her mouth. "Why would you. Take it back. Delete it. He is going to think."

"He is going to think exactly what I want him to think." Mor tucked the phone away. "Let him suffer. He had you in a hot tub under the stars and he told you to leave. He deserves every second of imagining you with someone else."

Elain pressed her hands to her cheeks. They were so hot she could have warmed the bench with them.

They sat in silence for a moment.

"Is there something else?" Mor asked. Quieter now.

"I don't know," she said. "Everything confuses me. But part of what confuses me is that I keep coming back to the same thought. That maybe the reason he stopped is not because he wanted too much. Maybe it is because I am not. Someone worth wanting. Like that."

The shift in Mor's face was instant. The warmth drained. The playfulness vanished. What replaced it was something Elain had never seen directed at her from Mor before. A sharp, almost fierce protectiveness.

"Elain." Mor's voice was low. "What the hell. Who told you that?"

The question sat between them.

"This also stays between us," Elain said again. "Promise me."

Mor's hand found hers. Squeezed. "I promise. Did something happen?"

Elain looked at the sky. Breathed.

"My ex-boyfriend," she said. "Graysen."

She told Mor about Graysen. About how he had stood by the window. How he had said she was beautiful. How he had told her she was not satisfying. That she was basic. That he had never felt what he was supposed to feel.

She told it without crying. She had used up those tears two years ago, and what was left was something drier and harder. Not a wound anymore but a scar, thick and numb on the surface, still tender if you pressed.

Mor did not interrupt. By the time Elain finished, Mor's expression had gone through several stages and landed on something that looked a lot like controlled fury.

"I barely ever agree with Nesta," Mor said. Her voice was flat. "But I think that is what she was trying to say at breakfast. He is a dick, Elain. He is a complete and total idiot."

Elain said nothing. She was looking at her hands again.

"He gave you the idea that intimacy means a woman has to perform for a man. That your job was to make him feel good, and if he did not feel good, it was your failure." Mor turned to face her fully. "Never listen to a man like that. A man who tells you you are not enough is a man who never learned how to be enough for anyone else. He projected his own inadequacy onto you and called it your problem, and you have been carrying it ever since."

Elain's throat was tight. She swallowed around it.

"Someone who wants you the way Azriel wants you. Someone who wants you so badly he has to physically stop himself and send you away. That is the opposite of what Graysen told you. The last thing Azriel was thinking last night is that you are not what he imagined."

"Mor."

"I am just saying. Your ex is garbage and he is lucky he is your ex. The very last thing you should ever think is that you are the problem. You are a beautiful, wonderful woman, Elain."

Something shifted behind Elain's eyes. Not warmth. Something sharper.

"That is the issue," she said quietly.

Mor frowned. "What do you mean?"

"It is always just my face." Elain's voice was steady but thin. "Everyone says I am beautiful. Beautiful Elain. Pretty Elain. It is always that. As if being beautiful is the whole of me, and everything underneath is. Ordinary. Disappointing. Not enough to hold someone's attention once they have gotten past the surface."

Mor's jaw tightened.

"Okay. It is not my place to say this. It is something Azriel should tell you himself. But I want you to understand him a little better."

Elain looked at her.

"He never talks about himself, Elain. Never. So if he has told you even a little bit about his life. Even a fraction. That means he trusts you in a way that is honestly insane for him." She glanced at Elain. "He told you about his mother, didn't he?"

Elain nodded. Slowly.

"Do you know that he never told Feyre? Feyre knows, but she knows from Rhys. Azriel knows that she knows, but he has never once spoken about it to her himself. Not once. And Feyre is family to him. But he told you."

Elain felt something rearrange in her chest. Something small.

"There is a lot more to his life that you do not know yet," Mor continued. "He grew up in poverty. Rhys's family took him in, and Rhys has been financing him ever since, and Azriel hates it. He has been working since he was a teenager to pay his own way, and the jobs."

She paused.

"They have not always been clean. Bodyguard work. Club security. And worse. He has done things I will not detail because they are not mine to tell, but he has done them because he felt like he owed a debt for existing, for taking up space, for being someone else's financial burden."

She turned fully to face Elain.

"He is one of the best people I have ever known. But he looks at you and he sees a flower. Something pure and untouched by the life he has lived. And he looks at himself and he sees mud. He does not see his own worth. He never has. And he probably thinks that drawing a line between you is the noble thing to do. That he is protecting you by keeping you at a distance."

"That is…"

"Stupid? Yes. Completely and idiotically wrong? Absolutely. But that is how he works. And if you ever manage to break through that, then that is something extraordinary."

The wind moved through the valley.

Mor smiled. Smaller now. Warmer. "I am still thinking about what you did to that classmate of yours. Az was probably somewhere falling apart because someone did something like that for him and he did not know what to do with it."

"He was fine."

"He was not fine. I'd bet money he was moved in a way he is never going to admit." Mor gave her a look. Fond. Knowing. "He is complicated. I hate complicated men." She tipped her head. Grinned. Winked. "That is why I am into women."

Elain laughed. The sound surprised her. Surprised them both, maybe. Because it was real. Loose. The laugh that came from somewhere beneath the pain.

Mor's grin widened. "Maybe I should tell Azriel to get his act together. Otherwise I am going to steal you from him."

"Mor."

"What. I'm serious. If he does not sort himself out, I am making my move." She stood. Stretched. Offered Elain her hand. "Come on. Let's head back before he has a full cardiac event."

Elain took her hand. Stood. "He would not do that."

Mor looked at her. The grin sharpened into something that was almost a dare. "You do not know what he is capable of."

Elain blinked. Something moved through her. Not fear. Not anxiety. Something lower and warmer. Something that lived in the same neighbourhood as the feeling she had had in the onsen when his voice had gone rough and his hands had gripped the stone.

She looked to the side.

"No I don’t know," she said. "But I think that makes him even more attractive."

The silence lasted exactly one second.

"Oh my God." Mor grabbed her arm. Started walking. Her laughter rang through the valley like a bell. "You are not innocent. Whoever in the world thinks you are innocent is lying through their teeth. Elain Archeron. You are not the sweet little flower everyone thinks you are."

And Elain laughed. Really laughed.

They walked back arm in arm, their footprints overlapping in the snow.

——

The cabin was quiet when they returned.

Mor pushed through the front door first, stamping snow from her boots, and the warmth of the great room met them like a wall. The fire was burning. The breakfast things had been cleared. The table was empty except for a single mug and a book lying spine up, pages fanned against the wood.

Azriel was on the sofa.

Legs stretched. Shoulders against the cushions. He looked up when the door opened.

Mor scanned the room. "The others are not back yet?"

"No." His voice was level. Reporting weather. "Still out."

Mor crossed to the kitchen. Pulled a glass from the cabinet. Filled it from the tap. She leaned against the counter and looked at him over the rim with an expression that was, to anyone who knew Mor, dangerously casual.

"And what did you do? Were you brooding here the whole day? Didn't go out?"

"I was reading."

"Sure." The word carried three syllables of disbelief inside its single one. Mor took a long sip.

Elain stood near the door. She noticed that he was looking at her. Not the way he had looked at his coffee that morning. This was different. This was direct. There was something searching in his eyes.

"What did you two do?" he asked.

The question was directed at neither of them and both of them. Aimed at the space between Mor and Elain.

Mor set down her glass. "You already asked me that. Over text. Still curious?"

He gave her a look. A side-eye.

"Well," Mor said, pushing off the counter. "Whatever. I am tired. I am going to my room to sleep until dinner."

She moved toward the stairs. Paused. Looked back at Elain with an expression that communicated approximately seventeen things in half a second. Good luck. Be brave. He is an idiot. I love you. Make him sweat. Then she was gone. The soft sound of her footsteps on the stairs. A door closing somewhere upstairs.

The fire popped. A log shifted.

Elain took off her coat.

She hung it on the hook by the door without hurrying. She slipped out of her boots. She stepped further into the room in her socked feet and she did not look at him.

She went to the kitchen.

She poured herself a glass of water. Drank it slowly. Set it down on the marble. The light in the great room was the deep amber of late afternoon, and the windows had begun to fill with the blue of evening pressing against the snow.

"Did you have a good walk?" he asked.

His voice was careful. Controlled. "It wasn't bad," she said.

He made a sound. Not quite a laugh. Something sharper, something with edges. A chuckle that came through the side of his mouth and carried with it a bitterness she had never heard from him before. It did not suit him. "Yeah," he said. "I bet it wasn't. Definitely great."

The word great landed like a slap.

Not loud. He had not raised his voice. She was not sure she had ever heard him raise his voice in her presence. But the consonants were bitten off, the t clipped, the whole syllable carrying more weight than it should have been allowed to carry.

He was pissed.

The realization moved through her. Azriel, patient and measured and unreachable Azriel, was pissed, and he was doing a terrible job of hiding it.

She watched him. He was not looking at her. He was looking at the fire. The muscles in his jaw were working in small slow contractions, as if he were grinding down something he refused to say.

"So you just sat here and read all day?" she asked.

"Yes."

"All day."

"Yes."

"While we were out."

He turned his head. He looked at her.

"While you were out," he said. "Yes."

She put down her glass.

"And was your book good?" she asked.

"It was fine."

"What was it about?"

He did not answer.

She crossed her arms. She was standing on the other side of the kitchen island and he was on the sofa twelve feet away.

And finally she said: "There is no neighbour, Azriel."

He looked at her.

"Mor made him up. She was teasing you. There is no guy. There was never a guy. She thought it would be funny."

The information entered him. She watched it. She watched the way his shoulders shifted by a fraction of a degree, the way the line of his jaw loosened.

He did not say anything for a second.

"Mm," he said.

"Mm?"

"Okay."

"Just okay?"

He stood.

He did it slowly, the way he did everything, but there was a small tightness in the movement that suggested he had been holding himself in place on the sofa for longer than was natural.

"I am going upstairs," he said.

"Why?"

He paused.

"To get some air."

"You are inside."

"Some space, then."

"You are running away."

The words were out of her mouth before she had decided to say them. They landed in the room and stayed there, and he stopped halfway between the sofa and the staircase with one hand on the back of the sofa and his body half-turned away from her, and she watched the line of his shoulders go still.

He turned back.

He looked at her.

"You ignored my text," she said.

"Elain."

"You ignored it all night. You ignored it all morning. You barely looked at me at breakfast. You sat here all afternoon being angry about a man who does not exist instead of answering one text from me." Her voice was steady. She did not know how it was steady. "And now I tell you there is no neighbour and you say mm, okay, and you try to go upstairs."

"I know."

"You know."

"I know what I did."

He looked at her. The line of his mouth was tight. His hands had moved to his sides and they were open and still, which she had come to understand was how his hands behaved when they were doing the most work, when he was holding himself in a position his body did not want.

"I owe you an apology," he said. "I am sorry."

"For what?"

"For ignoring you. For not answering. For this morning. For all of it."

"And for last night?"

She watched him hesitate.

It was the smallest hesitation. A half-beat. The half-beat of a person choosing between two answers and not sure which of them was true.

"For crossing a line," he said.

She tilted her head.

"Who said you crossed a line?"

She watched the words land. She watched the slight widening of his eyes, the very small confusion that moved through them. He had constructed an entire morning around the belief that he had done something to her, and she was, very calmly, telling him he had not.

"You do not get to apologize for something I did not ask you to apologize for."

The fire crackled. The room was quiet around them. She could feel her heartbeat in her wrists and in her throat and in the place just under her sternum where the bravery she had been borrowing from Mor was beginning to feel like her own.

"You do not get to decide where my lines are without asking me," she said.

He looked at her.

"I do not know what to say," he said.

"Try."

"I do not know what I want."

The sentence came out unfinished. Raw at the edges. The face he wore when he said it was not the careful patient face he wore for the world. It was something thinner. Something with no scaffolding underneath it.

"But I know it points this direction," he said. "Whatever this is. It points here. To you."

She did not breathe for a second.

The room held its breath with her.

She walked around the kitchen island.

She crossed the space between them slowly, in socked feet, until she was standing in the soft amber light a few feet from where he stood, close enough to see the way his pupils had gone wide in the firelight, close enough to see the small uneven rhythm of his breathing.

"I am going to ask you to do something for me," she said.

He looked at her.

"What."

"Bite your lip."

He blinked.

"What?"

"Bite your lip. The way I do."

He looked at her. He did not understand.

"Just bite your lip."

"I don't..."

"Please."

He bit his lip.

He did it carefully. A little uncertainly. He caught his lower lip lightly between his teeth and held it there, and the expression on his face was somewhere between bewildered and patient, willing to be ridiculous in front of her if she had asked him to be.

She lifted herself up onto her toes.

She did not give herself time to think. She did not give herself time to talk herself out of it. She lifted up onto her toes and she put her hand very lightly against the front of his shoulder for balance and she pressed her mouth to his.

It was very quick.

It was the smallest kiss. A press, a half second of contact, the soft warmth of her lips against the soft warmth of his and the small startled stillness of him in the moment she did it, and then she was already pulling back, already lowering herself down off her toes.

She looked at him.

His eyes were wide. His lip was still faintly indented from his own teeth where she had kissed him.

"That," she said quietly, "is what I want you to do when I bite my lip."

Before she could even lower her hand from his shoulder, he moved. The hesitation evaporated into pure, predatory grace. His hands snapped forward. One found the back of her neck, fingers sliding hot and desperate into her hair, while the other banded around her waist, hauling her flush against his solid chest.

Finally, he kissed her.

He didn't just kiss her. He devoured her.

His mouth crashed down on hers, parting her lips with a frantic, starving urgency that made a small, startled sound get trapped in her throat. The second he heard that sound, a low, feral growl vibrated through his chest and straight into hers.

He walked her backward. He couldn't break the kiss, he was completely incapable of it. He tasted like night and smoke and a desperation so profound it made her knees weak. She stumbled back as he pressed forward, blind to the room, until her calves hit the bottom step of the staircase.

He didn't stop. His hands tightened on her hips, lifting her effortlessly onto the second step, instantly stepping into the space between her knees. He pinned her there against the banister, his body an unyielding wall of heat trapping her against the wood.

His tongue swept along her lower lip, and then pushed inside, claiming her mouth with a wildness that left her entirely unmoored. It was intoxicating. It was every ounce of control he had been holding, all the space he had tried to put between them, weaponized into absolute ruin.

Elain melted into it. She let her head fall back, opening fully to him, her hands flying up to grip the lapels of his shirt, pulling him closer when there was already no space left to close.

He broke away, chest heaving, his eyes entirely black in the firelight. He didn't go far, only dragging his open mouth down the line of her jaw.

"Elain," he breathed, the word frantic against her skin. "Elain."

He kissed the pulse point at her throat, his teeth scraping the delicate skin, sending a jolt of pure fire straight down her spine. He was trembling. This man who was entirely stillness and stone was shaking apart in her arms.

He surged back up to claim her mouth again. This time, it was deeper, wetter, his hands sliding down to grip her thighs, pulling her hips flush against the hard, aching lines of his body.

There was nothing careful left. He kissed her like a dying man at an oasis, like the world was ending outside the front door and this staircase was the only piece of heaven left to plunder.

Then, he pulled back just a fraction of an inch. His chest rose and fell in ragged bursts. He looked at her swollen mouth, his eyes dark with a hunger that was currently ripping them both to shreds.

He caught her lower lip between his teeth. He bit down, exactly as she had asked him to, but with a feral heat that made her whimper.

He drank the sound down, swallowing her gasp as he took her mouth again, finally showing her exactly what he wanted.

She had imagined a kiss.

In the quiet, lonely moments of the past months, she had imagined warmth and softness. The easy, abstract idea of being kissed by him, something careful, something polite, something strictly controlled.

She had not imagined this.

She had not anticipated the specific, scorching heat of his mouth, or the slight, intoxicating roughness at the edge of his lower lip. She hadn't braced for the sheer, staggering force of a man who kissed her as if he had been holding this single act inside his body for longer than she had been waiting for it. He kissed her like he had been starving for it all afternoon, all weekend, for the entire agonizing stretch of time since they had met.

Against the banister of the stairs, he devoured her, but suddenly, even that wasn't enough. He needed more. The space between them, however small, was suddenly intolerable to him.

With a raw, impatient sound vibrating deep in his chest, he broke the kiss, only for a fraction of a second. Just long enough for his hands to drop from her waist.

They went straight to her hips.

He gripped them. And it was not gentle.

It was the absolute first not-gentle thing he had ever done with his scarred hands on her body, and Elain felt the shock of that difference instantly. The pressure was no longer the small, careful, protective touch he had offered her in doorways and quiet rooms. This was a touch with massive weight in it. With a feral, unyielding want in it.

His large hands closed fiercely around the small bones of her hips, his long fingers digging possessively into her flesh.

"Hold on," he rasped roughly against her mouth.

He lifted her.

Elain gasped into his mouth, the sound immediately swallowed by his tongue as her legs instinctively flew up to wrap tightly around his waist. He caught her weight effortlessly, hauling her flush against his chest, completely ignoring gravity as he carried her away from the stairs.

The kiss didn't stop. It turned completely ravenous as he strode across the living room with her anchored entirely to his body. She clung to his broad shoulders, her fingers twisting violently into the hair at the nape of his neck. Her mind was spinning, completely short-circuiting, overloaded by the scent of him, the desperate taste of him, and the hard, rhythmic flex of his body moving against hers as he carried her.

Then he was setting her down.

The sudden, shocking cold of the marble kitchen island bit through her trousers, a stark and dizzying contrast to the radiating furnace of the man pressing into her.

He settled her securely on the edge of the stone counter, keeping her legs parted so he could step perfectly between her knees. The angle was entirely different now. His mouth was right there, exactly where it belonged.

His hands slid from the desperate grip on her hips, tracing up her waist and mapping the curve of her spine until they rested flat between her shoulder blades. He pulled her forward, sealing her against him until every single line of her upper body was pressed perfectly flush against the solid wall of his chest.

He kissed her until her head spun, until the freezing marble beneath her and the fire crackling in the next room entirely ceased to exist.

Then, slowly, agonizingly, he stopped.

"God," he said.

It was the smallest word he had ever said to her.

It was the largest.

"Elain," he said. His voice was scraped raw the way it had been in the water.

"Yes."

"I have been," he said. "I have been wanting to do that. For a long time."

She laughed. She did not mean to laugh. The laugh came out of her in a soft shaking exhale against his face, and he was looking at her raw but still in a way very soft.

"I have too," she said.

His thumb moved against her jaw.

"Tell me," he said.

"Tell you what."

"Tell me when you started."

She thought about it. She thought about a snowy night in December and a stolen truck. She thought about the stranger at the library, she watched secretly from far away.

"A long time ago," she said.

His forehead pressed against hers.

"Same," he said.

She lifted her face just enough to brush her nose against his.

"Azriel," she said.

"Yes."

"Kiss me again."